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Error processing SSI file			Teacher Resources Promote Probing and Prompting It's no accident that questions are at the heart of classroom resources provided by Intel® Innovation in Education. "Questions offer an invitation for students to pursue important learning," explains Jane Krauss, a veteran teacher who helps to develop online resources for the Intel Innovation in Education Web site. "Getting teachers to ask better questions, and getting students to ask each other questions, helps students think through their understanding." In Cell-to-Cell, one of the 50 unit plans, high school students explore the function of cells. Intel Innovation in Education promotes effective questioning in a variety of ways. In face-to-face professional development, Intel® Teach to the Future models the use of essential questions to frame the design of classroom projects. Similarly, more than 50 exemplary unit plans available online begin with questions intended to help teachers open the door for student learning. Seeing Reason and Visual Ranking, online tools available from Intel Innovation in Education, also support the use of questioning as a classroom strategy. Both tools prompt students to use higher-order thinking skills. Seeing Reason encourages students to think about and discuss cause-and-effect relationships in complex systems. Visual Ranking encourages students to analyze, compare, debate, and negotiate as they go about making ordered lists. "Our tools do a good job of changing discourse in the classroom," Krauss says. Both tools include an online workspace where students create visual representations of their thinking. Explains Krauss, "Your thinking is laid bare by these tools. That leads naturally to questions and discussions. Having students work in teams also generates more questions, student to student and student to teacher." Questions Worth Asking Grant Wiggins, author of Understanding by Design and a well-known expert in curriculum design and assessment, suggests that teachers begin planning a new project by asking themselves some key questions. In an approach he calls "backward design," Wiggins encourages teachers to consider: What do you want students to know and understand? What will it look like when they have that knowledge and understanding? Starting with the end in mind helps the teacher plan a road map for student learning. In the classroom, teachers can make skillful use of questioning to take student understanding deeper. According to the National Research Council, "A question robust and fruitful enough to drive an inquiry generates a 'need to know' in students." In addition to igniting students' curiosity, good questions help them build new understanding onto what they already know. Research about classroom discourse has focused attention on the way ideas are exchanged in the classroom. "We know from research that teachers ask more questions than students, and that most of those questions relate to procedures and facts," says Krauss. To shift discourse to a more active model, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) encourages teachers to consider the flow of conversations in their classroom. NCTM suggests paying attention to: Who talks? About what? In what ways? What do people write, what do they record, and why? What questions are important? How do ideas change? Whose ideas and ways of thinking are valued? Who determines when to end a discussion? Teachers interested in promoting deeper thinking might start by asking more probing questions. For example: What do you notice? What can you conclude? Can you tell me more about this? How is this different from what you expected? Why is this important? Promoting Deeper Thinking What does good questioning look like in practice? Middle school teacher Theresa Maves was recently introducing a unit on invention and design. She asked her students to use the Visual Ranking tool to rank 10 inventions according to their impact on society. As student teams explained the reasoning behind their rankings, Maves noticed that nearly every team ranked radios near the bottom of the list. "We talked about this and why, and I asked students if they thought having more information about the inventions would affect their ranking." Students conducted research in the technology lab, then taught their classmates mini-lessons about each invention's history. "Students then went back into their original groups and re-ranked the 10 inventions. This was a fascinating process," Maves relates. "Radio made its way to the top of several lists once students understood its purpose besides listening to music and its rich history of communication during wars and for mass entertainment. The process also brought up much evaluative thinking about ranking an invention's impact. I was completely impressed with the natural thinking process taking place. Also, it was fascinating to the students to see how their thinking compares to another group and how all that can be translated into numbers (using the correlation feature of the Visual Ranking tool). It was a great debate starter as we compared two different groups that now were armed with knowledge to support their thinking." Among students' conclusions, Maves notes, was this keen insight: "You can learn from other people's thinking, and their thoughts help spur more thinking that you wouldn't have done otherwise." To learn more about Seeing Reason, Visual Ranking, or the exemplary unit and project plans available from Intel Innovation in Education, go to www.intel.com/education.
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